Unwinnable » Dennis Scimecahttp://www.unwinnable.com
Videogames & Geek CultureSat, 01 Aug 2015 20:30:05 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3I’m Not A Bithttp://www.unwinnable.com/2014/04/08/im-not-a-bit/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/04/08/im-not-a-bit/#commentsTue, 08 Apr 2014 16:58:40 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=49739Lizzie danced around with a zombie, on the front lawn of the house where she, her sister Mika, and the two adults they were traveling with, Carol and Tyreese, had taken shelter. Carol was making tea in the kitchen, enjoying the luxury of clean water pumped out of a nearby well and a functioning gas stove.

When Carol looked out the window and saw Lizzie laughing and twirling as the zombie growled and made desperate swipes at the little girl, Carol dashed outside, knife in hand.

“Get away from it!” she yelled. “Right now, Lizzie!”

“No, no, no!” Lizzie screamed as Carol knocked the zombie to the ground and stabbed it through the head with a trench knife, the thick metal knuckles wrapped around Carol’s fingers.

“She was playing with me! She wanted to win!” cried Lizzie, as if they’d been playing a game of tag.

“She wanted to kill you,” Carol said angrily.

“What if I killed you?” Lizzie screamed. “You don’t understand! She didn’t want to hurt anybody! She was my friend, and you killed her!”

Lizzie doesn’t seem to understand that zombies are dead, because she keeps getting upset when people kill them. Carol didn’t know this yet, but Lizzie also enjoys butchering bunny rabbits and staring at the corpses.

As I watched the scene, I imagined taking Carol aside and saying “We need to get rid of Lizzie, because she’s clearly out of her fucking mind and she’s going to get the rest of us killed.”

I bet that’s precisely what people would say about me if the zombies rose and I was denied the therapy and meds that keep my bipolar disorder from rearing its ugly head.

If, in the face of constant pressure to survive, I began to suffer bursts of anger or energy which I couldn’t immediately control, and if the stress of worrying about when I might become unraveled outweighed my usefulness, would people look at my aberrations, see them as weaknesses and decide that I wasn’t worth keeping around?

———

As some of you may have either watched the rest of the episode of The Walking Dead I’m referring to or read the comic book such that you know where that storyline is going, this is the part where I have to say that I don’t actually have anything in common with Lizzie other than in the metaphorical sense of her having some sort of mental illness.

Thinking about Lizzie as “mentally ill” versus crazy had happened earlier in the episode.

Lizzie and her sister Mika had been attacked by a zombie that tumbled over the front porch of the house while Carol and Tyreese were inside clearing the place. Mika shot the zombie in the head as it crawled towards her and her sister. The adults came running outside to make sure the girls were okay, and Lizzie started crying.

“Why are you upset, Lizzie?” Carol asked. “Were you scared?”

“No,” Lizzie said.

“Then why are you crying?” Carol asked.

“I don’t want to say,” Lizzie choked out. She collapsed on a metal garden bench and her sister Mika walked over to console her.

I’m pretty sure that what Mika and Lizzie were doing was something similar to what I’ve been taught as “mindfulness.” It’s a meditation practice that, at least the way I understand it, is wrapped closely into Buddhist thought, the idea that one can tackle all the anxieties and misplaced priorities we wallow in as human beings by focusing intently on the here, and the now, and realizing that the moment is all we actually have.

This is what I felt Mika was helping her sister Lizzie to do, albeit without any of the religious connotations. Mika was helping her sister to be in a moment other than the wave of panic or terror or whatever Lizzie was feeling. Mike was helping her to be in a moment of calm by counting, meditating on pretty flowers.

In those moments I stopped thinking about Lizzie as being “out of her fucking mind” and started thinking about her as being “mentally ill.” The difference, of course, is empathy over judgment, a desire to help out of love over a desire to isolate out of fear.

———

I mark myself as a potential liability to any employer, organization or group who might otherwise be interested in me once I make the admission that I suffer from mental illness. I have to be specific about what I have – bipolar disorder – and that it no longer makes me a liability because it’s under control, thanks to treatment.

Even so, there’s nothing I can do to prevent someone reading over the phrase “mental illness,” or more specifically about bipolar disorder, and lumping me into whatever stereotypical images run in their head when they see the words, and dismissing my potential without a second thought.

Because then I just represent a can of worms they’re afraid they might have to open someday, and don’t want to. Not when someone else can do the same job I’m trying to do, but without presenting the potential hassle of dealing with something most people are afraid of.

And I can’t even blame them for it.

People try to be supportive, and to tell me that what I’m writing here isn’t true, and that people have grown more tolerant and understanding about mental illness and that I shouldn’t want to work with anyone who judges me for it anyway.

To which I want to but never say, on the first point, “what’s your evidence for this?”

When Salon wrote about my Kotaku piece on being mentally ill, loving violent video games and never wanting to kill anyone, I made the mistake of wading into the comments. I thought about grabbing some choice quotes to illustrate my point about the lack of this tolerance and understanding which friends and family would like me to believe isn’t there.

I decided not to go back because I didn’t want to read people saying things like “He may be safe now, but what about later?” There may be trolls on the internet but I can’t blame someone for feeling this way. We still don’t talk openly and often enough about mental illness for most people to understand anything.

There’s a reason why the character of Carrie Mathison on the Showtime drama “Homeland” is depicted as being dangerously unstable, owing to her bipolar disorder, when she gets off her meds. That is at least a conversation about mental illness taking place in mass media, like when Sally Field portrayed a woman with bipolar disorder on NBC’s ER.

But when I’m watching Homeland with my wife and my father-in-law and someone on the show mentions Carrie’s condition, or Carrie is having some sort of a freak out, I think about my father-in-law and I wonder.

“Is this ever how he thinks about me?” I ask myself. “Does he ever worry if his daughter has to deal with this sort of thing from her husband?”

Which makes me want to respond to that second point about not wanting to work for anyone who judges me on the basis of my bipolar disorder, saying that I wouldn’t blame my wife’s father if he did think that way. Unless he’s gone out of his way to learn otherwise – and my hope is that over 15 years my wife has had time to explain my realities to him – why wouldn’t he worry about things like that?

And who could blame him?

———

The moment Carol interrupted Lizzie in her insane game of tag with a zombie, any empathy I’d had for Lizzie when she and her sister were looking at the flowers and counting down was gone. Lizzie had gone back to being “fucking crazy” again, and was a problem to be dealt with permanently.

She was going to hold back everyone else. She was going to put them in danger. She was like a computer bit a binary digit that can only hold one of two values, and it wasn’t worth the risk of waiting for her to flip again.

I don’t write about this more often because I don’t want anyone to think of me as a bit changing state from 0 to 1, appearing normal at one moment and showing some sign of my mental illness through the cracks at another.

It’s also why I isolate myself from groups. It’s easier just to keep my distance, even if the times when I do surround myself with wonderful people I feel connected, accepted and at home. I never know when they are going to flip on me and decide I’m not worth the trouble anymore.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/04/08/im-not-a-bit/feed/0Creating a Playground of Wonderhttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/11/12/scale/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/11/12/scale/#commentsTue, 12 Nov 2013 08:57:58 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=47936Scale is the freshest take on first-person perspective games I’ve seen since the original Portal. It is being developed by Steve Swink, who describes himself as a game designer first and foremost, but who also teaches game and level design, including master classes at NYU, and has published a book titled Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation.

Scale is a puzzle game that allows players to scale objects up or down within the constraints of conservation of mass. If a puzzle’s solution requires walking through a hole in the wall and the hole is too small, for example, the player can increase the size of the entire wall in order to make the hole larger, but to do so the player first has to decrease the size of other objects in the game world.

I first saw a demonstration of Scale in the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in 2012. I had my first chance to actually play Scale at GDC this year, and sat down with Swink for an interview shortly thereafter.

The Kickstarter campaign for Scale is running until Friday, November 15th. Scale has almost reached its goal for PC development, and an eventual release on Steam. The final stretch goal is to raise enough money to release Scale on Sony’s eighth generation PlayStation 4 console.

I enjoy seeing indie games made available on the widest number of platforms possible. The indie game movement advances game literacy in a way that blockbuster videogames, for the most part, cannot, and the further indie games can be moved out of the confines of their traditionally small, PC-based audience, the better.

What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation I had with Swink earlier this year. Scale has undoubtedly gone through several iterations since I last experienced it, but what I was most taken with was the spirit in which Scale was developed, which I am positive will shine through no matter how many iterations and changes the game goes through prior to release.

Steve Swink: The problem with designing puzzles is that they’re either infinitely difficult or infinitely easy. As soon as you’ve solved the puzzle it’s now zero challenge, but before you’ve solved it, all the time up until that point, is frustrating.

It’s really frustrating, as a designer, to watch somebody struggle with that, but at the same time that struggle is what’s beautiful about it. As a designer of a puzzle game, what you actually need to think about more than the puzzle and how clever it is in the moment when somebody solves it, which is what you often find yourself focusing on, is what they’re going to do while they’re trying to solve it, and how to make that really interesting.

Braid is perfect in that regard, because it plays with a series of steps over time, and you’re always going backwards and forwards and rewinding and it feels really good, and so it’s perfectly suited to making a puzzle game out of, whereas I think Scale is much more playful. It’s much cooler to just play around in a space and play with ideas of the size of things and be able to manipulate them and make fun or funny or interesting or weird or surprising things happen.

Unwinnable: Which do you think is more important in Scale? The play or the puzzle solving?

S. S.: I was talking to a friend of mine in New York about what I was doing with Scale and showing it, and she said “Why do you have to make puzzles out of it?” And I said, “That’s a really good question.”

I feel like a big failing of Shadow Physics [a previous puzzle game which Swink chose to stop development on] was constantly trying to find those really beautiful puzzles, and I found a few of them, but it was just like pulling teeth, and [when his friend made her comment] I was like, “That’s really smart.” So I have a bunch of ideas for puzzles, and ideas for stuff, but I think that what I’m going to do, moving forward, is just be way more open to what’s awesome about Scale.

I think sometimes you, as the designer, don’t get to decide how people are going to use the game or enjoy the game. I worked on Tony Hawk, and we had this idea that there would be like five different types of players who would play Tony Hawk. That was just written into the DNA of the company.

“Well, we need to have some stuff in the level for scoreheads, and we need to have some stuff in the level for people who collect everything, and we need to have some stuff in the level for actual skaters who just care about skating and they’re just going to skate the one bench over and over again, and they want to do videos and record stuff,” and so on.

That’s one of the exciting, interesting things about being a game designer: it’s a participatory medium. You can’t, you don’t get to decide how people are going to do stuff, so the best you can do is try to lead them into things that you think are really cool and fun. The space exists outside of you, in a weird way, and you’re just curating what happens in it.

Which is interesting, and letting go of that control is hard, especially for people like me who are control freaks. But then you have people who very successfully, almost scientifically, test levels over and over again until they can tell exactly what the player is going to be looking at, at any given moment, and they control that rigorously.

Unwinnable: You’re talking about Valve and the way they’re using biometrics and tracing eyelines and whatnot.

S. S.: Yeah, but I mean, you don’t need to trace eyelines to polish the shit out of Portal, right? You just watch a bunch of people play it and they test every week, and they watch people play it, and they find the parts where they get hung up and they fix those problems. And I think, actually, you can really disrupt the integrity of a work if you go overboard with that. I think rough edges and weirdness in games are really interesting.

The creator of Adventure Time, Pendleton Ward, was playing Scale and he was just laughing his ass off, and I was cringing because the stuff he was doing was, like, making a rock as big as the universe, and he was just blowing everything up and launching shit all over the place, and he’s just, “Oh my God, this is so awesome,” and I was like, “Okay, yeah, so, I need to stop controlling this stuff. I need to stop trying to control it quite so much.”

Unwinnable:You believe in revisiting older games to see what they have to teach you. Is there a particular older game which influenced Scale?

S. S.: I play old games all the time, and I think there are a lot of old games that do things well, and we’ve overlooked quite why that was and we’re taking way too many assumptions on faith.

Mario 64 has a lot to teach us about creating a playful space that is inviting and interesting, and for Scale, I’m looking at a structure that’s very similar to that. I want you to go in and play and be invited, but I want to give you some structure.

There’s a certain brilliance [in Mario 64], you come into a level and there’s like 20 different things you can do to get a star, but it gives you one in case you are feeling aimless. It’s such a simple, straightforward solution. We’ll just give you a list of things and you just do the top one on the list, and we don’t even show you the other ones. You unlock them as you go, so you don’t get overwhelmed or confused and there’s a certain, brilliant simplicity to that.

It’s so much better than whatever your latest objective is, it just pops up on your HUD, and you just do it.

Unwinnable: So it sounds like the spirit of play is more important to you than anything else.

S. S.: What I really want is people to experience something they’ve never experienced before, for people to feel a sense of wonder, which I hope will lead them to wanting to create their own stuff.

[Scale] is about the experience of something that you can’t experience in any other game, or in any other context, really, and it plays with the idea of the size of things, and the space between them. I don’t need to get wrapped up trying to make this a really difficult puzzle with a bunch of steps. It’s not very difficult, it’s just interesting.

Unwinnable: To what degree do you factor that potential distraction of fascination in Scale? Even if the puzzles are relatively simple, it is a puzzle game that ostensibly requires some concentration to solve.

S. S.: I think Jenova [Chen, designer of Flower and Journey among others] has a lot of really interesting ideas on this. How much structure can we take away and still have the player feel like they’re doing something interesting and meaningful and directed? That’s an interesting question, and I would like to pursue that.

Sometimes you have a thing that just invites people to be playful. I think Keita Takahashi does a wonderful job of designing games that just invite people to be playful. Katamari Damacy was a really interestingly perfect balance between a weird, crazy thing and being playful, and an actual structure for you to work in.

You can make a game that’s just a mechanic, like the scaling, and I can turn people loose with it and see what they want to do.

Unwinnable: Considering you wrote a book called Game Feel, what is the feeling or sensation you want to give players with Scale?

S. S.: At a basic, tactile level, when you are scaling an object up it’s almost like blowing up a balloon, like it has that same kind of playful thing, because blowing up a balloon is fun. It’s more fun if you’re using one of those little pump things so you don’t have to put the air forward, yourself.

It’s really important to me that scaling a thing feels really good, and so I put this little jiggle in it, when the inflation stops it kind of does this little happy jiggle thing. It’s subtle, and you don’t think too much about it, but it makes it more believable that any object could be changed like that, to me, for some reason.

I feel like a mechanic has to be free in some respects, otherwise why bother doing it, right? You play Mario, and there are levels in Mario that are about scaling stuff, like in Mario 64 there’s that level where you go through the tiny door, or the tiny pipe, and then you come out big and go back and forth, but to me those levels fall short of giving me the experience that I want which is the wonder of being able to really explore scale.

That’s how I arrived at the point of wanting to make this game. I want to play with the scale of objects, and I want to do it freely.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/11/12/scale/feed/0I’m not Afraid of Zombies, I’m Afraid of Ushttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/11/01/im-not-afraid-of-zombies-im-afraid-of-us/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/11/01/im-not-afraid-of-zombies-im-afraid-of-us/#commentsFri, 01 Nov 2013 06:14:06 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=47797In last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, a zombie ripped someone’s throat out and then that guy got up and ripped someone’s stomach open and before you know it a bunch of zombies were attacking a bunch of people until the humans came in and busted the zombies’ heads open with pipes and knives and I thought “Meh, that doesn’t seem that bad.”

I’d worry more about that reaction if I was one of the 5% of the audience who reliably raises their hand when Max Brooks, the author of World War Z, asks who is looking forward to the zombie apocalypse. Anyone who is serious about answering the question with a “Yes” is an idiot. The zombie apocalypse would suck.

A guy like me would be dead within a week or so. I do cardio and lift weights but I’m not fast or particularly strong. I’ve fired World War II guns at a shooting range but couldn’t tell you much about modern weapons. I can sling words, but I am not an engineer, or a doctor, or someone else possessing a skill set that will become invaluable when society falls apart. I’m not going to be very attractive for a survivor community which can only take so many people in behind the walls.

Yet the idea of a zombie apocalypse is also comforting, in a way, because it means dispensing with all the bullshit that goes along with living in a society.

When I was a teenager, my dream was to buy a bunch of land in Vermont, build myself a self-sustaining mansion home with water wells, solar power and a huge garden, then build an electrified, barbed-wire fence around the perimeter. Then I’d build my own little landing strip and whenever I felt like dealing with the outside world I’d fly out on my private prop plane and come back whenever dealing with people became too much to bear, because people make no sense and scare the hell out of me.

I can deal with zombies. They’re slow, predictable and stupid. But people? Just a few weeks ago a collection of regular imbeciles financed by some very rich imbeciles shut down the United States government and threatened to risk a worldwide financial disaster because they didn’t want to see 20 million people get health care.

I’m not supposed to call these people imbeciles because it’s impolite, and because I’m supposed to respect their opinions and work with people like this to find compromise, which sounds insane to me.

It’s like suggesting that when the zombie apocalypse happens and some guy doesn’t like that we’re sharing the food with everyone instead of who he thinks should get the food, and he keeps threatening to open the main gate and let all the zombies in unless we do what he wants, that we’re supposed to negotiate with this guy instead of throwing him over the wall and letting the zombies take care of the problem for us.

And here I am acting all high and mighty about these Tea Party people, but when the zombie apocalypse comes, would I refuse to work with one of those people because of how they voted back before society fell apart? Maybe, even though it probably wouldn’t make sense anymore. I’m people. I’m only predictable in my ability to ignore logic because I don’t feel like acknowledging it.

———

Some of the first human civilizations developed between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, and along the banks of the Yangtze River in what is now China. Civilization, or the act of living in close proximity to other human beings in an organized fashion instead of running around acting like maniacs and doing whatever the hell we want all the time, developed there because people needed to work together in order to control the annual flooding and use the rich riverbank soil to grow crops and feed everyone. People learned to work together because otherwise most of them might starve.

It terrifies me that this is the level of threat required to get people to work together, but imagine the survivor community in a zombie apocalypse which turns down people of color or homosexuals because they don’t want “those kinds of people” behind the walls and pitching in as equals. I’m afraid of all the idiots who would need something like a zombie apocalypse to realize the error of their ways, and there are shit tons of them all around me.

Sure, there would still be some bad apples – the other staple moral of post-apocalyptia is that other people are more dangerous than whatever else is out there – but the good guys who survived would do so by embracing the best of what makes us human.

———

I was fascinated by Dawn of the Dead when I discovered it in high school, mostly because I didn’t buy the premise. I don’t think society would fall apart in the face of a zombie uprising. There are people on Earth who deal with worse crises on a daily basis. Killing zombies might be easier to handle than feeding everyone or worrying about suicide bombers or the warlord in the neighboring town.

Humanity would figure it out, and we’d be better off for it. So I don’t fear the zombies. I fear the people who make and enforce the laws, or run the government, or sit at the head of huge corporations that favor profit over considerations of ethics, or the people who think climate change isn’t real. When society collapses all of our communal stupidity goes away because we won’t have time for it.

The apocalypse would still suck, but it’d be a suck I could grasp and do something about. I’m all about lesser evils.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/11/01/im-not-afraid-of-zombies-im-afraid-of-us/feed/0Survival of the Geekiesthttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/06/27/survival-of-the-geekiest/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/06/27/survival-of-the-geekiest/#commentsThu, 27 Jun 2013 04:22:48 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=44621The Walking Dead's fall of Atlanta.]]>Tom sighed as the chaos erupted around him in the grocery store. People swept whatever they could off shelves into grocery carts. The floor was wet with the contents of Lord knew how many broken bottles, and when people slipped and fell they cut their hands and their blood contributed to the mess.

Tom shifted the baseball bat in his right hand and briefly considered looking for a can of peaches, but they were probably gone anyway, and he had the plasticware he’d come for. His bug-out bag had been packed for days, but as he’d prepared to leave Atlanta, Tom had realized that plasticware would make less noise than metal knives and forks. Stealth would be important once he got out of the city.

The zombies didn’t kill you […]. What killed you were all the dumbasses who hadn’t seen enough movies.

The parking lot was a mess of vehicles parked at all sorts of crazy angles to one another. Tom saw someone leave his car running as he dashed toward the grocery store, and saw someone else immediately jump in the car and drive away. A couple of teenage kids were trying to wrestle an old man’s keys away from him, and the old man pulled a gun.

That’s when Tom heard the screaming behind him. Tom turned and saw the ambulance driver shuffling into the parking lot. Someone must have run him over. His left arm was smashed to pulp and it looked like the entire left half of his chest was caved in. The ambulance driver’s DayGlo vest was soaked in blood.

The old man with the gun had also turned at the sound of the screams, saw the ambulance driver and fired a few shots. The driver went down. A little girl had fallen to the ground just a few feet away and started screaming as the man began to get back up. He heard her screams and crawled in her direction.

Tom sighed again and shoved his way through the crowd that was running away from the driver. Tom raised his baseball bat and smashed his skull in with multiple blows, spattering Tom’s jeans and shirt with blood.

That’s when Tom turned around, faced the crowd watching him with horror and finally lost his temper.

“For Christ’s sake, have none of you ever seen a zombie before?”

———

To be fair, Tom had never seen a real zombie until a few days ago, either. But like the rest of his geek friends when he’d heard the odd news reports about people going insane and attacking their relatives, and the isolated stories of some new kind of disease being reported in other cities, Tom had hit upon the possibility of the living dead pretty quickly.

As he walked back to this apartment, Tom passed a woman sitting on the stoop of her building, sobbing while she cradled the head of what Tom assumed was her husband, crimson only seeping now from the gaping bite wound in his neck. Tom didn’t know how long it would take for her husband to turn, but he knew what would happen once her husband did.

“If he was a goddamned vampire you’d know what to do with him, wouldn’t you?” Tom yelled at her. Of course she would. Stake through the heart, sunlight, burn them alive, everyone knew something about vampires.

Tom considered walking over and bashing in the head of her husband’s corpse, but he had to get moving. He had a long ride ahead of him, probably two or three days what with staying off the main roads and taking the right amount of time to find a safe spot to sleep at night along the way.

———

Tom settled his backpack as he got on the bike and tugged on the handle of the baseball bat that he’d secured to the backpack with bungee cord. The bat wouldn’t get in his way while he rode, but Tom also wouldn’t be able to draw it quickly. But that’s what the bike was for. Not being around to have to fight in the first place.

Besides, Tom could still hear the popping reports of what he assumed were assault rifles and the thunderous booms that he guessed were coming from the tanks that had rolled into the city yesterday. The National Guard was trying to hold Atlanta, and Tom figured the noise would be attracting most of the zombies in the area, leaving his escape route relatively clear for the time being.

Tom thought back to the woman on the stoop as he pedaled and wondered if she and her husband were both shuffling around at this point and looking for someone to eat. People like her were why the city had fallen apart in the first place. Tom had been hoping for days that everyone would get their acts together and realize that a gaggle of slow, shuffling, stupid-ass zombies was manageable. If the zombies had been runners, everyone would have been fucked from the get-go. Shamblers could be dealt with if you got a hold on the problem quickly, before it spread.

Of course, that didn’t happen. So now Tom and his friends were meeting outside the city to head to Rainsville. They were going to hole up with another friend who had a house just enough off the beaten path to be safe for a little while – long enough to plan next moves, anyway. A nerd might not be an expert in weird shit but they were less likely to be caught entirely flat-footed when weird shit blew into town.

“It’s not the zombies that kill you,” Tom muttered as he crossed an intersection. He spared a glance down the long row of city blocks to his right and saw a few zombies in the street far enough away not to be a threat, but close enough to give him reason to pedal harder.

Tom hadn’t bothered to change out of his blood-spattered clothes because it didn’t seem worth the time. He had figured he was going to sweat and probably get dirty during the ride, anyway.

The bullet slammed into his chest and Tom was knocked clear off the bike, which clattered to the sidewalk. Tom looked down at the fresh blood soaking his shirt. He yelled out in anger as much as in pain.

“Oh my God,” came a man’s voice from somewhere above Tom. “I saw all the blood and I thought…”

“I was on a fucking BICYCLE!” Tom screamed. He heard more gunshots, and then a chorus of groans, and craned his neck to verify what he already knew. A crowd of dead people had been attracted by the first shot, and then by Tom’s screams.

Whoever it was with the rifle had crap aim. Tom was losing a lot of blood. He was too dizzy to yell to the man to aim for headshots, but he thought about all the comics, and the movies, and the TV shows, and the characters who couldn’t keep quiet, or who left the door open or made whatever mistake that meant the end for everyone else.

The zombies didn’t kill you, Tom thought just before the first pair of teeth bit into him. What killed you were all the dumbasses who hadn’t seen enough movies.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/06/27/survival-of-the-geekiest/feed/0Words Can Make You Do Terrible Thingshttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/27/words-can-make-you-do-terrible-things/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/27/words-can-make-you-do-terrible-things/#commentsSat, 27 Apr 2013 07:12:09 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=42786I forget what inspired the fight with my girlfriend in the autumn of my sophomore year at college. She and I had been dating since high school and were always having stupid arguments, but this one ended with my girlfriend expressing her dissatisfaction with me by pointing at my stomach. She had been a runner on the track team whereas exercise and I were relative strangers to one another.

Naturally I felt she had scored a low blow and threw her out of the room with a “Good riddance!” to boot, but the anger behind my indignant reaction flamed out quickly. The sine wave of my mood disorder that charted my emotions took hold and I realized my girlfriend and I had been together for three years and how much I still loved her. Within a day of the breakup I was so low that I didn’t leave the dorm for anything other than meals or the bathroom.

After a week or so of this my friend Andy suggested I come with him to the library’s computer lounge to play a MUD, which stood for “multi user dungeon” and was essentially a multiplayer version of the text adventure game Zork released in 1980. If you’re not familiar with Zork, which is now entirely possible as the game is 33 years old, let me shamelessly steal from its Wiki page to explain.

Zork would describe the location or room the player was in and identify any objects of particular interest:

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.”

The player would then interact with the world using text commands:

“>open mailbox”

Then the game would describe the results of those actions.

“Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.”

I’d tried about five minutes worth of Zork on the computers in the back of my fourth grade classroom but that had been the entirety of my exposure to text adventures. I grew up gaming in shopping mall arcades or on my home Atari and Nintendo systems. Playing the MUD with Andy felt archaic and frustrating and I would have walked away from the game if not for the social aspects.

Communicating with other players in the MUD worked pretty much the same way communicating with players in a modern-day MMO works. You could /shout to everyone logged into the game, you could /say to people in the same area as you, I’m pretty sure you could /guild to talk to guild mates only, or you could send a /tell which was a private, one-to-one conversation.

That I completely eschewed the MUD as a game but embraced it as a social experience makes complete sense to me in hindsight. The actual game systems in my first MMOs like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies felt like grinds to me, but chatting up other players was always fun.

I hadn’t been in the MUD very long before I met Mary. She was snarky and sharp. I must have been just the kind of charmingly-arrogant person she found interesting because, within a week of running into each other in one of the game dungeons, Mary and I were logging into the MUD daily just to chat privately with one another. I began spending the majority of my evenings in the library’s computer lounge and when it closed for the night I’d relocate to the computer lab that was conveniently located in the basement of my dorm.

I do not regret remembering the details as to how Mary and I moved from just chatting to becoming romantically involved, especially not if episodes like typing out the lyrics to Faith No More’s “Underwater Love” as quickly as I could in chat while listening to the song – which Mary found extremely romantic for some reason – is typical of what I’ve forgotten, but it was a textbook rebound after a breakup.

I remember finally having the wherewithal to get my computer with the orange monochrome monitor and dot matrix printer hooked up to the Internet so I could log into the MUD from my dorm room. It was after several months’ worth of this, and graduating to expensive and therefore occasional long distance telephone calls, that I realized spring break was quickly approaching and I had the bright idea to visit Mary at her college in Des Moines.

Show me the 20-year-old man who doesn’t do extremely stupid things in the course of getting laid and I’ll show you a eunuch.

I remember throwing the idea past my father just to see what he thought. He loved the idea of my adventure. I’m not sure whether he conveniently skipped the question of why I was willing to spend almost two days on a Greyhound bus to visit a girl I had never met, or if it just never occurred to him. Show me the 20-year-old man who doesn’t do extremely stupid things in the course of getting laid and I’ll show you a eunuch, a devoutly religious person, or someone who is so tremendously unlucky or inept that he has never had a chance to make stupid decisions in the interests of his penis.

As I thought about ways to raise cash for a round-trip bus ticket, I looked at my Bach trombone in the corner of the room. I’d been a trombone player since third grade. In my junior year of high school, when I wanted to audition for the Empire State Youth Orchestra Jazz Ensemble – that being one of the best high school-level jazz bands in the state of New York – I wanted a new trombone other than the old Yamaha I’d been playing for years.

My parents bought me a Bach bass trombone that also had a thumb trigger which allowed me to switch notes without having to move the trombone slide. It was a very nice instrument, but I stopped playing jazz in my freshman year of college. By my sophomore year the Bach trombone sat unattended in my closet. I was only playing in the marching band and the pep band for which my old, rusty Yamaha was more than adequate.

I brought the Bach into a music store that bought and sold used instruments. They offered me several hundred dollars for the trombone. That was way, way less than my parents had paid for it and so I declined. That night as I chatted with Mary in the MUD I looked at the Bach trombone case and wondered if I’d made the right decision.

———

While Mary and I did have the occasional phone call, we still communicated mostly through text. It was all too easy to idealize what the encounter with her would have been like. The power of that fantasy and the momentum of my rebound mixed into a noxious potion that I metaphorically drank and then, entranced, went back to the music store and sold my Bach for even less than their first offer, but I finally had the money for the bus ride.

I bought the round-trip ticket and called Mary. She was ecstatic. It was around this time that I realized I probably ought to actually see what she looked like in person, and asked Mary to mail me a picture. She was neither ugly nor beautiful, but certainly no one I’d have pursued based on looks alone, but I decided those were shallow considerations anyway.

The bus ride was hell with layovers and changes in New York City and Chicago. I listened to cassette tapes on my Walkman and got as much sleep as I could over two days. I remember waking up to the sight of rows upon rows of cornfields out the windows on both sides of the bus and realizing I was getting close.

We arrived in Des Moines. I saw Mary waiting for me. Her picture had been too kind. I thought about how little I’d really gotten to know this person outside of the tone-sterile text chat environment of a MUD, and how crazy all of it was. I had a mind to just slink down, hide myself behind the seats and exercise my return trip ticket immediately. But I knew Mary had gotten us a hotel room, as I’d suggested when we’d planned the visit. I was desperate for a shower, some clean clothes and some sleep, and as long as I’d made the trip anyway…

I forgave myself for making that trip to Des Moines. I’ve never forgiven myself for selling the Bach trombone to pay for it. And I don’t worry about being exposed to violent videogames and gore. I worry about the words in videogame chat rooms. Words have made me do terrible things, especially when they were my own.

———

Don’t follow Dennis on Twitter if you’re as afraid of words as he is: @DennisScimeca.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/27/words-can-make-you-do-terrible-things/feed/0We Stared Into Infinity and Saw Only Madnesshttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/18/we-stared-into-infinity-and-saw-only-madness/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/18/we-stared-into-infinity-and-saw-only-madness/#commentsThu, 18 Apr 2013 16:50:10 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=42453Bioshock Infinite is exactly the game it is supposed to be.]]>I was extremely late to the BioShock party. I remember playing the demo on Xbox Live. I floated down to a city in the sea (a ridiculous proposition at best), was met with art that felt cartoony compared to the military shooters I loved and fired archaic weapons like tommy guns and revolvers at people wearing vintage clothing. I was not interested.

It wasn’t until I began writing about videogames in 2010 that I discovered BioShock was an important game. BioShock was thrown in the face of claims that videogames weren’t art. I read about the theme of Objectivism and Ayn Rand and how wonderful the art deco design was and storytelling through environment and Little Sisters and Big Daddys and a lot about this auteur named Ken Levine.

Complaining that the violence in BioShock Infinite isn’t necessary feels like a complete misread of the story.

I read so much about the damned game that I felt I didn’t need to play it anymore. That felt increasingly irresponsible the further I progressed in my career as a writer-about-videogames, so I picked up BioShock in 2012 and finished it in February of this year, because I felt the need to do so before BioShock Infinite was released.

I had a vastly different experience with BioShock than what the critical consensus suggested I ought to have had. It’s probable that reading so much about the game beforehand ruined my opportunity to experience any sense of wonder. Playing BioShock was like having read a hundred first-hand accounts of trips to a foreign country and having seen hundreds of photographs of key landmarks from all the angles and then going to the country in person. The only surprise BioShock had in store for me was, “Would you kindly?”

———

When Irrational Games began development of BioShock Infinite, they could not have imagined the state of videogame criticism in 2013.

E3 2012 was the site of a rebellion of sorts, when large segments of the videogame press turned on the preponderance of violent, mainstream fare on display at the show. The presence of booth babes at E3 faced sharper criticism than ever before. Issues of race and gender equality loomed large at the Game Developers Conference this year, an event which is also being hailed as if it were a tipping point or sea change in the relationship between independent game development and the AAA industry.

The criticism of BioShock Infinite that struck me the most was Leigh Alexander’s piece on her blog, Sexy Videogameland. Alexander’s critique contains and mirrors all the other pieces of criticism I’ve pointed at, but her writing felt downright mournful as she recounted the emotional nature of her visit to Rapture in BioShock compared to the emptiness she felt on her tour of Columbia in Infinite. It’s the most damning take down of BioShock Infinite I’ve read thus far, but it’s couched in comparison to BioShock. I appreciate her critique most of all because she’s blunt about the comparison taking place whereas others merely suggest or allude to it.

BioShock was not a profound experience for me. I felt moments of joy every time I saved a Little Sister and those were my favorite moments in the game, but I forgot about Rapture’s art deco style when I was blasting Splicers and murdering Big Daddys. The repudiation of Objectivism felt obvious and immediate and I forgot about it quickly. I recognized the uniqueness of BioShock compared to most of the other shooters I’ve played, but it didn’t feel like the milestone in videogame development I’d been expecting. It was a very cool shooter with a questionable ending.

My context for the experience of playing BioShock was a videogame industry replete with examples of artistically valid and emotionally powerful videogames pouring out of the indie scene. I have to account for how that affected my reaction to BioShock, but I’m glad for the critical distance and the lens through which I viewed the experience. I can’t imagine that if the original BioShock were released today it would have garnered nearly the same critical reaction as it did in 2007.

I don’t want to assume what anyone else’s experiences with art or indie games were when they played BioShock back then, but maybe it was considered such a revelation because it didn’t have much competition? It certainly doesn’t seem like it did if I peruse a list of what else was released that year. Maybe BioShock was so breathtaking to critics because it was a game intended for mainstream consumption, not an off-the-radar indie game one might expect to have more artistic validity by default.
When you’re dying of thirst, a brackish puddle of water is the most delicious water you’ve ever tasted. Not that BioShock was a brackish puddle of water. It’s an imperfect metaphor because I have much more respect for BioShock than the metaphor implies, but hopefully you take my meaning.

When I read criticism that BioShock Infinite is too violent I can’t wrap my head around it. I was also surprised by the violence early in my playthrough of Infinite, but I realized that was only because I didn’t expect the violence in a BioShock game. When I shucked off my preconceived notions about what a BioShock game ought to be, I considered the six years that had passed between the two games.

When I shoot someone at close range with an explosive shotgun in last year’s Borderlands 2, I watch their body fall apart into bloody chunks. That BioShock Infinite is in line with current trends among shooters is not a problem in my mind. No one ever said it wasn’t going to be a shooter for shooter players, and the standards for shooter fare have changed.

I think reactions to Infinite’s violence have a lot to do with the change in environment. When you bashed a Splicer in the head with a wrench in BioShock, the blood looked more like purple goo than blood, and this was forgivable considering the game largely takes place in shadow. When you bash someone with a Sky-Hook in Infinite, you’re often doing so in the light of a bright, sunny day, so now the blood is closer to the dark crimson color it ought to be.

Is using a Sky-Hook to break necks actually more violent than smashing someone in the face with a wrench or is the violence more gory, which is an entirely different observation? And in recognizing the presence of that gore do we also account for the advances in visual fidelity in the intervening six years between BioShock and BioShock Infinite? I feel it would be exceedingly silly not to expect the violence in BioShock Infinite to look different than the violence in BioShock and to then hold that against Infinite.

I can’t make sense of criticisms that the violence in Infinite makes the game inaccessible. Why should BioShock Infinite be any more accessible to someone who doesn’t play first-person shooters than Call of Duty? Why hold Infinite up to different standards in this regard? Because its environment is more thoughtfully crafted? My wife also might have been interested in BioShock Infinite if not for the shooting, but that’s not a knock against Infinite. That’s a statement about what kind of games my wife does and doesn’t like.

Complaining that the violence in BioShock Infinite isn’t necessary feels like a complete misread of the story. The violence is essential. Infinite makes sure the player understands Booker DeWitt did something horrible at the Battle of Wounded Knee, and rather than describing that horror, the game shows the player in every combat sequence. The violence both defines DeWitt’s desperate need for spiritual rebirth and explains how even that radical transformation can’t cleanse him of the evil he’s done. It lives on through Father Comstock’s desire to rain fire upon the world and punish humankind for its sins.

Maybe no one’s made this point because they’re afraid of spoiling the ending, but saying the violence in BioShock Infinite isn’t necessary is disingenuous if the critic groks the narrative.

When I read criticism that BioShock Infinite doesn’t live up to its narrative expectations, or that it ought to have something to say about the social and political problems it observes but does not, I think back to the original BioShock and wonder whether “Objectivism is bad” is actually saying something meaningful about the social and political systems it observes.

If the original BioShock didn’t have anything substantive to say about Objectivism, then why hold Infinite up to a different measuring stick and suggest that if it doesn’t have substantive commentary on racism and classism and American exceptionalism, that the omission is a failing this time around? I didn’t expect deep philosophical discourse from Infinite because I didn’t see it in BioShock. Like Ian Bogost recently said on Twitter, “The biggest lie about BioShock 1 is that it had anything to say about Rand.”

I am not arguing that people shouldn’t be criticizing BioShock Infinite. It has a lot of problems that go beyond clipping and inappropriate responses when Booker catches a coin from Elizabeth, like saying “Perfect timing!” when they’re standing in a ladies’ room. It’s the nature of the criticism around Infinite that’s shocking, because it sounds like people are upset for not getting things I don’t think they should have expected to get, or reacting poorly to getting content they ought to have been expecting.

I return to Leigh Alexander’s critique, which I admire for two reasons. She hits upon what I think is the most salient criticism of BioShock Infinite for our discussions moving forward: Infinite does not have the same weight of storytelling through mise-en-scène as BioShock did. She also cuts straight to the bone about what I think is going on in the predominant criticism of BioShock Infinite.

I didn’t have the same emotional relationship with BioShock that Alexander did, and that relationship is the basis for her holistic analysis of BioShock Infinite. She isn’t prescriptive. She doesn’t say anything is a shame. She doesn’t pronounce who the game ought to have been accessible to. She doesn’t mock. She constantly voices her disappointment in BioShock Infinite in light of how she felt about BioShock.

Criticism is about assessing what a piece of art attempted to achieve and whether or not it achieved it. I think perceptions about what BioShock Infinite is trying to achieve have been distorted by idealized memories of what we thought BioShock meant to achieve, and therefore much of the criticism of Infinite feels off to me. It is being expressed as disappointment for Infinite not doing things the game ever purports to be doing, because people think BioShock was doing things it didn’t and they expected those illusory pursuits from BioShock Infinite as well.

BioShock was a study in mise-en-scène and in-engine storytelling that took place in a superlatively-crafted environment. It was not a profound statement about Objectivism or made any attempts to sublimate first-person shooters. What made BioShock important was that critics could attempt to read deeper themes into the game and have those discussions in front of the mass audience. BioShock was an accessible way for critics to explain to everyone what craft meant in game design.

I think BioShock Infinite is just as important for exactly the same reason. I disagree with a lot of the criticisms being levied at the game. I also celebrate the fact that these conversations are being conducted in a much more visible fashion than might otherwise be the case, owing to how high-profile the game is. Mass market videogame consumers are far more likely to read critical discourse around one of the most important AAA releases of 2013 than they are to read a discussion of the themes in a game like Cart Life, which is off their radar entirely.

I agree with Leigh Alexander that we stand in a crucial moment, and I am thankful to BioShock Infinite for making this moment possible. And maybe by understanding this moment I also finally understand why everyone reacted to BioShock the way they did, even if I didn’t share the experience with them.

———

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, Massachusetts. He will be opining about the tragedy of violent videogames on Twitter @DennisScimeca.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/18/we-stared-into-infinity-and-saw-only-madness/feed/3Rules of Engagementhttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/08/rules-of-engagement/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/08/rules-of-engagement/#commentsMon, 08 Apr 2013 05:13:00 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=42117Battlefield 4 experience Electronic Arts is promising. ]]>EA revealed the new Battlefield game at GDC 2013. You can watch the same 17-minute trailer online that the press was shown in an AMC movie theater, but imagine the power of the new Frostbite 3 engine blown up huge on a movie screen. Seagulls weave in circles in the sky and the motion is smooth and organic. When we take cover behind a cement block, the gradations of light and shadow in the pockmarked surface are subtle. The God beams from the setting sun are soft and diffused.

When the squad attempts to make their escape in a stolen car by speeding down a road that lies next to a river, the mist sprays onto the windshield and congeals into thick drops. And when the Americans finally shoot down the Russian gunship, it pinwheels into the ground, peppering the Americans’ escape vehicle with a shower of macadam that is as fine a demonstration of particle physics as I’ve ever seen.

The graphics are fantastic and next-gen, but the action is staid and played out. Try watching the trailer on anything other than an HD monitor. Concern yourself with the substance of what’s in the frame, and not how it looks. We may as well have been watching something out of Battlefield 3.

The demo was the target of skepticism and sometimes harsh derision from other journalists as we exited the theater – and I would blame most of that on the presentation by Patrick Soderlund, executive vice president for EA Games – immediately after the demo ended. Soderlund talked about a new era of interactive entertainment – quality, innovation and passion – and new ideas and ways to entertain people. The best games are not about polygons or shaders, but emotional connections to the player, he said.

“Technology has allowed us to become better storytellers,” Soderlund said, extolling the stress of the moments we saw in the demo, and the sense of imminent danger that is “very real, and very human.” But it wasn’t, not at least in the eyes of the journalists covering the event. We’ve been there and done that. Our cynicism may have been born from hearing a similar pitch from Greg Goodrich at last year’s GDC reveal of Medal of Honor: Warfighter and his talk of authenticity and human stories. In the end, we were handed a game that delivered on none of those promises.

When I sat down with Patrick Soderlund later that evening, I asked some obligatory questions about the technology. Yes, the demo was running on a high-end PC. No, the Frostbite 3 engine scales very well but of course you will see a difference between a console’s performance and that high-spec PC rig. Then we talked about story.

There’s a moment in the demo where a squadmate named Dunn is trapped under the wreckage of a building that has just collapsed around the American squad. The player is given the choice to either cut Dunn’s leg off at the knee or not. In the demo the player decides to make the cut. It’s tastefully presented, it’s clearly meant to be an emotional moment, but it also makes me think about Spec Ops: The Line, a critique of the way military shooter players have become desensitized to the violence in military shooters. This moment in the Battlefield 4 demo may be cut from slightly stronger stuff than we’re used to in the Battlefield franchise, but it’s still a much slighter act of violence than what the player will commit throughout the rest of the game.

I brought up Spec Ops to Soderlund and suggested that cutting off a soldier’s leg might not be shocking at all to a veteran of military shooters. Are EA and DICE aware of what Spec Ops means to point out, and are they designing Battlefield 4 with that desensitization in mind, I asked?

“DICE is considering the experience they want to give the player. And they’re looking at it obviously from its need to be tasteful, its need to feel relevant and its need to be within a realm of possibility, of reason,” Soderlund said. “But remember that this is a Mature-related game. This is intended for 18 years and above, and I hope that people look at it and not think about those things as much as they think about the overall experience that the guys are bringing to us.”

His answer was a dodge, but in the absence of seeing the final product there was no room to push him while also being reasonable. It’s a 17-minute demo. The choice of cutting off Dunn’s leg may hold no significance and thus no emotional power to an audience that is used to gunning down hundreds or thousands of people in the space of a single military shooter campaign, but perhaps there will be other choices in Battlefield 4 that do carry an emotional component and that may resonate with even the most seasoned mil-shooter audiences.

I doubt it. Battlefield 4 is being released into a games industry that feels like it has changed significantly in a short amount of time. The Games Developers Choice Awards mostly shunned triple-A titles for games with more substance. When it comes to emotional experiences in video games, the rules have changed. I asked Soderlund if he thought games like The Walking Dead had raised the bar on forging emotional connections between videogame characters and players.

“I loved Walking Dead. Having played it quite a bit, there are elements of Walking Dead that when you play it, decisions you have to make, parts of the game that you feel bad about certain decisions you have to make,” Soderlund said. “That’s exactly the same type of drama and emotion that we want to try and portray with Battlefield. Not to make you feel bad by any means, but to make you feel involved, engaged and conflicted, like, ‘What’s going on here? What do I have to do?’ You know, cutting Dunn’s leg is an option. You can decide to not cut the leg, if you want. Then you’ll see what happens.”

The question is how much different the Battlefield 4 experience is going to be based on these sorts of choices. Could we expect the Battlefield 4 single-player campaign to change, in any appreciable fashion, based on whether or not we cut off Dunn’s leg? The experience of The Walking Dead changed in meaningful ways as a result of our choices. The idea of having even a vaguely similar experience in Battlefield 4 is difficult to swallow in the absence of any demonstration to prove the point.

So much of the demo presentation and my conversation with Soderlund afterward were concerned with Frostbite 3 as a tool for storytelling. Frostbite 3 is about visual fidelity and seamlessly blending motion capture performances, hand key animations and AI and the ability for the team at DICE to mimic film techniques like anamorphic lens flares (something which Soderlund brought up several times), none of which have anything intrinsically to do with good storytelling.

That’s the lesson that Journey, arguably the most emotional videogame experience of 2012, taught us. It had beautiful art and flawless technical performance, but the art was simple and the game played so smoothly because there was nothing extraneous mucking it up and getting in the way. So I asked Soderlund what games like Journey tell us about the relationship between technology and emotional game experiences.

“I think Journey is a great example of the fact that you don’t need to have a crazy production budget, that a good idea goes very far,” Soderlund says. “Journey is a very emotional game experience for the player, and kudos to the people who made it. And to me, going back to what we’re doing, again, that’s exactly what we want to achieve, that type of emotional experience is what gamers seek, what gamers want, and we as game creators have an ambition to give them that. ”

The first part of Soderlund’s answer is precisely the case. Emotional game experiences are not about production budgets and high-end graphics performance. When I asked Soderlund whether we were going to see the private lives of the soldiers in Battlefield 4, or meet their families or be given any other kind of emotional touchstones to really get to know the characters, I was told no. The game will focus on the soldiers in the field.

Delving into their private lives is the sort of thing the audience needs to set the characters of Battlefield 4 apart from every other collection of modern military squadmates the Call of Duty or latter Battlefield games have offered up. Presenting those squadmate tropes in higher resolution is not enough. Being under enemy fire together is not enough. Combat alone does not make for an emotional bond with AI squadmates, or else we would have been talking for years about how military shooters are emotional experiences.

We don’t, because they’re not.

———

Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Follow him on Twitter for a deeply emotional experience @DennisScimeca.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/08/rules-of-engagement/feed/0If You Don’t Buy a PlayStation 4, God Will Kill a Puppyhttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/02/25/if-you-dont-buy-a-playstation-4-god-will-kill-a-puppy/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/02/25/if-you-dont-buy-a-playstation-4-god-will-kill-a-puppy/#commentsMon, 25 Feb 2013 18:50:15 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=40935Console generations have historically been about moving the visual performance of the hardware forward. The gap between the current and previous generation was also about evolving connectivity. These are the two metrics I consider when I assess the need for another generation of console hardware, and then whether I need to get on board or not.

John Teti wrote a brilliant analysis of the PlayStation 4 preview event (I refuse to call it a reveal) on The Gameological Society and one of his arguments is that pushing hardware power does not equal innovation in videogames. David Cage took the stage during the preview to argue videogame creators have been hamstrung in their ability to create emotion owing to the technical limitations of previous hardware, equating polygon counts with the ability to depict human expression.

I don’t understand anyone who is already getting excited about the PlayStation 4. We know better than to do so this early.

I have four words to say to that. The Walking Dead. Journey. Games which do not require powerful hardware to run and are counted among the best games of 2012. Hell, Journey swept up at the DICE awards earlier this month and is likely to follow suit at the GCDAs in March.

As Teti witnesses, Killzone Shadow Fall is just more Killzone. The idea of “next generation gameplay” sprinkled here and there throughout the PS4 preview eludes me. I hope to hear game developers getting very specific in the near future about what they want to do on the PlayStation 4 which they simply could not do on the PlayStation 3 outside the realm of graphics.

PlayStation Home was a failure so now Sony is ostensibly going to look towards an Xbox Live-type community. The ability to quickly share content and upload videos could be interesting. The ability to observe other players’ sessions and to jump in and take control over their games to help is also interesting. We have no idea whether any of this will actually work, however, and from last week’s preview, these are the bulk of the new connectivity features the PS4 is going to offer.

They are also just promises, like the idea of cross-platform play with the PS Vita, and we ought to remain skeptical of all these announced features in light of Sony’s track record on console reveals as excellently outlined by Andrew Groen on Wired. I don’t understand anyone who is already getting excited about the PlayStation 4. We know better than to do so this early.

———

You have to buy next generation hardware because otherwise the videogame industry won’t know what to do with itself. And maybe God will kill a puppy. I don’t know. But you are expected to buy the next generation. That’s how it’s been for decades. So what happens if the pattern finally collapses?

I think it’s interesting that when Blizzard made its announcement about Diablo III coming to the PS4 we also learned the game was coming to the PS3. When Bungie took the stage to announce exclusive PlayStation 4 content for Destiny they reiterated that Destiny will also be released for the PlayStation 3. Doesn’t this sound like a hedging of bets?

This is going to be a console generation about justifications, and Microsoft will have to answer the same questions I’m throwing as a consumer at Sony. Why should I upgrade? What will the PlayStation 4 offer me that I don’t already have and that I wanted but didn’t realize?

I keep thinking about BioShock Infinite and the bar-raising master class in immersion and emotion it has been touted as offering us. Let’s say it lives up to the hype. Infinite is going to run on current-gen hardware. What might the next generation of hardware offer up as an improvement on what Infinite is attempting to do? If Infinite succeeds, what does that say about the remaining potential in the current generation and the need for the consumer to move on to another console generation at all?

The average gamer is 35 years old, now. We’re not a bunch of children who need to keep up with the kid down the block. Moving to another console generation is a pain in the ass. It’s expensive. It means mothballing old consoles and/or finding a way to keep them hooked up to our televisions in tandem with the new consoles if there’s no backwards-compatibility (which is the case for the PlayStation 4). The concept of not upgrading is going to seem much more reasonable to a whole generation of gamers than in any console generation-jump since we’ve been gaming.

Sometimes the pain in the ass is worth it. The Wii gave us a whole new way to play videogames. The Xbox 360 introduced the most successful social network on a console yet. The PlayStation 3 was a substantial improvement performance-wise to the PlayStation 2. So far the Wii U has borrowed from preexisting tablet technology and merely caught up with HD competitors visually. Last week’s PS4 reveal demonstrates a console playing catch-up with interactivity and addressing the patching shortfalls of the previous generation (and little else – see our own Stu Horvath’s piece on Wired). I’m not seeing a reason to get excited yet about spending hundreds of dollars on new gear and new games for said gear without any promises of truly new experiences.

There’s one more punch to be thrown in round one of the new console wars, but unless Microsoft comes into the ring with something truly special, we may be looking at pure brand loyalty as the sole motivator for console upgrades. Nintendo fans will need the Wii U to play their Mario games, Sony diehards will grab the PS4 for Killzone and whichever other exclusive franchises toddle on and the Xbox crowd will likewise stay their course as well.

You can tell Dennis he is entirely wrong about this on Twitter: @DennisScimeca.

]]>http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/02/25/if-you-dont-buy-a-playstation-4-god-will-kill-a-puppy/feed/9Recollections of a Cold War Relichttp://www.unwinnable.com/2013/02/19/recollections-of-a-cold-war-relic/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/02/19/recollections-of-a-cold-war-relic/#commentsTue, 19 Feb 2013 05:02:50 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=40737When I was a kid we had proper bad guys.

A fight is only interesting when it’s a fair one. The 21st century is the age of the military mismatch. Any great power that could stand toe-to-toe conventionally with the United States has no interest in doing so due to how intertwined all our economies have become. But no one gave a shit about that in the 1980s. Thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles stood in silos, ready to arc over the Atlantic and Pacific and rain radioactive fire down on the United States, Soviet Union and all their allies.

The nukes never flew, but we had decades of proxy wars in Southeast Asia and Central America where capitalist and communist ideologies pretended to clash when expansionist ambitions were really what was at stake. The United States wanted to spread their hegemony, but the Soviet Union was in the way and at times had every means to win the fight.

Like I wrote, back then we had proper bad guys. Now we have to manufacture them. That’s not to say our government never put the fear of the Soviet Union into us. But there was something very real behind the threat, like fleets of nuclear submarines ready to unleash their payloads of short range, multiple-warhead nuclear missiles as first strike weapons and a huge conventional army with massive tank divisions sitting ready in East Germany to crash through the Berlin Wall and invade Europe.

James Bond used to have real bad guys, too. He’d face off against and make fools of the KGB and we’d cheer because James beat the commies. When we watched Red Dawn, we’d feel the patriotic blood in our veins and mentally pump our fists as some high school kids showed what would happen if the Reds tried to take over our land. The Xbox Live Arcade game, Toy Soldiers: Cold War, is a monument to the good ol’ days when Rambo flew to Vietnam to rescue prisoners of war and slaughter some socialists.

———

My maternal grandmother was Russian. When I was an infant she used to tell my mother that I had “the eyes of Rasputin.” My grandmother died when I was very young, so I have no memories of her. When it came time to choose a language to study in middle school, though, I picked Russian by way of trying to connect with that part of my heritage.

My father had to learn Greek in college, and every year an award was given to the student who did the worst in the class. Dad got one of those, and whatever made it so difficult for him to learn foreign languages was passed on to his son. Russian is a complicated language with a different alphabet and six cases in its grammatical structure. I was doomed before I began.

In my senior year of high school I began taking college-level Russian history classes by way of a second attempt to connect with my Russian blood. I learned that Russia had been invaded by the Mongols in the early 13th century and forced to send tribute to the Golden Horde until the middle of the 15th century, causing the Russians to miss out on huge swathes of the Renaissance and all its learning, cultural advancement and the birth of a middle class. The idea of looking at the Russians as a backward, underdeveloped people as if they were inferior to their American enemies didn’t make as much sense anymore.

In light of the Mongol invasions, the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 and the Nazi invasion of 1941, what did begin to make sense was the existence of the Warsaw Pact, the column of nations in Eastern Europe that the Soviets had occupied at the end of World War II as a buffer zone between themselves and the West. If my nation had been repeatedly invaded over many centuries, I might want a sense of security in the face of a new, powerful threat like NATO. Ronald Reagan’s exhortations for Soviet Premier Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, another rallying cry to feel American and smugly superior to our Russian enemies, started to sound a little silly.

I won’t bore you with the details of further history lessons or Progressive dogma. In the years since, I’ve discovered Noam Chomsky, read about American support of brutally totalitarian regimes, the American generals who wanted to immediately invade the Soviet Union at the conclusion of World War II and how the United States, if we’re being fair, was just as responsible for the Cold War as the Soviet Union was. We were two nations enjoying the ascendancy earned through a major victory in a huge war, so we butted heads for five decades. If we look at the nations now through a stupidly-reductive lens, they’re both ruled by financial concerns that don’t prioritize the needs of their people, so maybe the Russians never really were that different than us.

———

Now there are no real bad guys anymore. There are small groups of bad individuals capable of doing us harm, but there’s no army threatening to invade us. No one talks about nuclear missiles anymore. There are still proxy wars taking place, but they’re not part of the grand stage they used to be set upon, and the only people who regularly concern themselves with the KGB are the animated characters in the television comedy series, Archer.

Now I have to question whether anyone our government identifies as the enemy actually is. There are no war drums to beat, just interminably long, morally-questionable brush fires and American occupations of nations that never stood a chance of repelling us – occupations to look on with sadness, unless you’re a neo-Conservative or part of some other hawkish flock.

The thing about having bad guys is you get to have good guys, too – even if the false dichotomy breaks down the moment you peek behind the curtain. As a kid during the Cold War, I had no reason to ever question whether I ought to be proud to be an American, as I stared down the red flag with the yellow hammer and sickle while shaking my fist in defiance. Now I’m usually proud of my country, but not always.

I miss the Soviet Union. They were such a good bunch of bad guys.

———

If you miss the Soviets, too, Dennis would love to hear about it on Twitter @DennisScimeca.

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http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/01/25/stretched-thin/#commentsFri, 25 Jan 2013 05:12:42 +0000http://www.unwinnable.com/?p=40087For the last year, I’d been thinking about going to my grandmother’s assisted living facility, sitting down with my digital voice recorder and getting the story of her life. She was 93 years old and there was so much about her I didn’t know.

I’d heard bits and pieces of stories about growing up during the Great Depression, or what it was like to be at a high school dance and hear the announcement that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States was at war, but I never heard the complete versions and now I never will.

When I was a kid, time crawled. Now I’m almost 40 and it flies. I should know better than to think there’s always more. I only have so much time to parcel out and didn’t choose to spend some of it sitting in that room with my grandmother and hearing her stories.

It’s the Third Crusade and I’m a member of the Assassin’s Guild traveling to Jerusalem on horseback and killing Templars, the ancient enemies of my order and invaders of the Holy Land. When I arrive at the city I receive the name of the man I am meant to kill. I leap between rooftops with power and grace. I vault down into the streets, see my target, blend into the crowds and am lost in them.

———

I should also know better than to buy more games than I have time to play. I can say I write about videogames and therefore have a professional motivation to buy an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 and a Nintendo Wii and games for all three, but it’s bullshit because I don’t do very much game reviewing. I want all the platforms because I’m a consumer and a collector and I just want them all.

When I was a kid I owned maybe a dozen cartridges for my Nintendo Entertainment System and had even fewer games for my Super Nintendo. I never had more than a handful of PC games. I knew my games inside and out, all the secret levels and the hidden bonus objectives and whatever Easter eggs the game developers had tucked away for players to discover. No stone was left unturned and no road went untraveled.

Now I look at my huge collection of unfinished games and lie to myself that someday, maybe when I’m retired, I’ll go back and finish all the games I’ve abandoned because then I’ll finally have the time to do so.

———

I’m a detective in 1947 Los Angeles and the star of a film noir. I solve murders and clean up crime on the streets. I gather evidence, loudly accuse innocents, chase cars down narrow alleys and get into shootouts. The movie plays out until a frame gets caught in the virtual projector, the picture tears and I don’t bother splicing it back together again.

I’m sealed away in an underground chamber to protect me from the giant asteroid that’s going to strike the Earth. I awake a hundred years later to discover a post-apocalyptic society rising from the dust and a totalitarian Authority looming over it. I travel the wastelands in a ramshackle buggy armed with guns and rockets, fighting bandits in the canyons and urban wastelands that lay in between the scattered human settlements. Then a storm blows in and buries the world forever.

———

I have a shelf filled with games I’ve barely touched, and the new consoles are coming out soon. I know what happens then. Anything I haven’t beaten from the last generation gets put into a cabinet alongside the cavalcade of games for my Sega Saturn, PlayStation 2, Sega Dreamcast, Game Boy Advance and the stacks of jewel cases for unbeaten PC games.

All of my current-generation games have been in the disc drives of their respective consoles at least once, but most of them will probably go into the cabinet virtually unplayed and looked at wistfully a few years from now as I wish I’d finished those adventures.

———

I’m an author on vacation with my wife in a tiny secluded town in Washington State. She is dragged into a lake by something and I dive in after her. When I wake up a week has passed. Shadows attack me from the darkness as I walk back to town, and I beat them back with flashlights and firearms, but eventually the scene fades to black and stays that way.

I’m in a hotel room in a resort on a tropical island. I wake up after a serious night of partying and stumble into the hallway where I’m attacked by the living dead. I’m immune to whatever’s infected the island and turned almost everyone into walking corpses and it’s my job to try and save the survivors, but I choose instead to shamble off and not return.

———

I chose to spend my time on endings rather than a stream of endless beginnings…

I was much more conservative about accruing games in 2012 from the usual fall deluge than I have been in the past. I could have afforded them all but decided to focus on the games I was really interested in. I chose not to become a steampunk assassin or fight the terrorists who took control of America’s drone army, but I did save Pandora from Handsome Jack, defeated the alien invaders attacking the Earth and saved us all from the Forerunners.

I chose to spend my time on endings rather than a stream of endless beginnings and remembered the satisfaction of finishing stories versus leaving the final pages unread. I wish I’d been smart enough to apply that wisdom to something other than my videogame hobby, somewhere that it really mattered.